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         (Reprinted from NORTHWEST REVIEW, Spring, 1959)

R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

THE COMPREHENSIVE MAN

  Editor's note: Mr. Fuller is a creative thinker and engineer whose ideas,

often 1morthodo.� and eve1i revolutionary, have made him pernliarly in­
fluential. His invention of the geodesic dome in particular has brought to
him international attetition. Widely applied, and designed on the principles
of energetic geometry, the geodesic dome is being used in srtch diverse
ways as iii the construction of theaters, in industrial architect1tre, and in
the b11,ilding of disposable Marine Corps battle shelters.
The following article is Mr. Fitller's revisio1i of an extemporaneous
discourse which he gave recently before the faculty of the School of
Architecture and Allied Arts in the University of Oregon. The article
is approximately one-q11arter the length of the transcription from a tape
recording.

                          I. EDUCATION

Alfred North Whitehead, in a pre-World War I statement on
education, noted that the processes of education were increasing the
numbers and sizes of graduate schools and were at the same time
selecting students of highest intellectual promise to enter into those
postgraduate schools and thereafter into careers of expertness m
specialized fields.
He then said this process would develop increasing numbers of
exceptionally capable men as brightly shining stars in·very special and
remote parts of Heaven-but unworldly stars, precisely because as
stars they would be "out of this world."
Whitehead went on to say that, whereas every action has its reaction,
such selecting of the intellectually strong men for specialization must
of necessity leave a weaker intellectual residue upon which would fall
the task of coordinating the everyday affairs of man-that is, the swiftly
multiplying inventory of special capability potentials produced by the
specialists would be harvestable only to the lesser limit of discernment
and comprehension of the residual lower-mentality integrators of
mundane affairs, regardless of how charming, loving, courageous,
energetic or cunning the latter might be.
Whitehead then foresaw an ultimate crisis in our society, wherein
the people who were responsible for putting things together, though
themselves subjected to improved educational techniques, would have
fallen so relatively far behind the more swiftly regenerative reaches
of the specialists in exquisite knowledge extension as to be practically
23
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

incapable of comprehending the integrable significance of the special­
ized findings. Ergo, the integrators would be unable to coordinate and
realize the commonwealth potentials opened up by the differentiators.
Ergo, our society would come to technical and economic stalemate in
the face of magnificent potential.
Quite possibly we have reached that era which might be properly
identified as "Whitehead's dilemma." Our scientists are worrying
about the exclusively negative and possibly lethal uses of their various
special discoveries. At the same time we find society unable to trans­
late the scientific discoveries into realistic magnitudes of comprehen­
sive commonwealth advantage. The macro and micro reaches of the
physical universe, whose energy may neither be created nor lost, have
been so successfully tapped by the scientists that the approximately
unlimited energies of a universe capable of doing realistically unlimit­
ed work, ergo of producing realistically unlimited wealth, now need
only their social comprehension and orderly social initiatives for turn­
ing on the valves of unlimited wealth for all humanity. It is precisely
the educated social comprehension and self-disciplined orderliness of
coordinate initiative which are lacking. Only the profound inertia of
ignorance common to all of man's everyday preoccupations and to all
of his as yet known and employable means of solving problems by
private or public enterprise and by any and all of his political and
cultural systems anywhere in existence around the world now with­
holds the practical realization of successful physical survival of all of
humanity, all at higher standards of living than have as yet been con­
ceived by any man. The problem is indeed a comprehensive education­
al problem.
In unique exception to the overall educational evolution depicted
by Whitehead, there are a few educational undertakings of the last
century which select the most promising students for advanced in­
tegrative capability. Notable amongst these exceptions have been
architecture, international law and military logistics, particularly the
world-ocean logistics. But architecture since 1500 (Leonardo's time)
has functioned only as an accessory after the fact of successful com­
merce and industry enterprise, which latter were entered into without
benefit of architects in their initial conceiving. Comprehensive world­
ocean logistical capability dropped from the curriculum of naval es­
tablishments in World War I when the autonomy of ships' captains
and admirals vanished with the introduction of world-around radio
communication. This leaves only the international lawyers and hot­
and cold-war militarists as halfway specialists exploiting extreme
scientific specialists while wrestling unilaterally with the comprehen-
24
 l
THE COMPREHENSIVE MAN

sive survival-destruction paradox and accelerating tempo of exclu­
sively negative crises.
For many years I have had the intuition that in the world of archi­
tecture there lies the possibility of the development of brilliantly edu­
cated men capable of a generalized comprehensive anticipatory science
of design, which both can and may be as effective in bringing about
man's general well being as has specialized education been effective
in bringing about only isolated successes within an otherwise general
environment of chaotic dismay, frustration and high frequency fail­
ures. I intuited that such a generalized architectural education could
be accomplished by employing the comprehensive-academic and edu­
cational strategy exclusively reserved, prior to World War I, for the
few most promising students found amongst the Naval Academy's
midshipmen, and since World War I, non-existent as an educational
strategy. Such an academic and postgraduate strategy involves the
working assumption that the individuals concerned may at some mo­
ment in their lives be confronted with the opportunity of taking the
supreme initiative in the conscious and comprehensive formulation of
mankind's critical participation in universal evolution.

         II. DIRECTIONS FOR THE STUDENT

I have often urged boys graduating in architecture to go into the
aircraft industry, not just to learn the stress-analysis which they would
immediately be taught, for the company would invest its time and
money to teach them, but if possible to get into production engineering
and to learn about the whole family of tools and the chemistries, the
alloys-all the strategies of very advanced technology. In other words,
these advanced aircraft industry tools would be the builders' tools of
our day, suitable to these innate integrators who really want to know
what they can do in our moment of history.
Then, too, I have urged star architectural graduates to go into other
economic experiences tending to give them a sense of world-around
distribution patterning and the very high-speed deliveries with air­
transport. I have urged them to get experience in any and all patterns
related to the whole world and to the most advanced tools. Particularly
I have urged them to learn what they can of chemistry, for I feel that
chemistry is basic structure, ergo architecture. I really am surprised
to find at the architectural schools that, despite the prevalent intuition
that one certainly ought to know a lot about technology to be a good
architect, the curricula tendency established to gratify that intuition
25
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

is only to give much more mathematics. For instance, at M.I.T. archi­
tectural students do not have to take chemistry after their first year
but do have to take five years of calculus, and I don't think any of
those students after graduation ever again use the calculus. Architec­
tural students are taught about a few dozen natural and so-called arti­
ficial materials which are only the superficially identifying aspects of
invisible chemical structuring.
With World War I the great chemical revolution brought to avail­
ability a quarter of a million chemical substances. All of those sub­
stances were comprised of the ninety-two regenerative chemical ele­
ments. They were complex, structural behaviors permitted by Nature.
They were not nature substitutes, though many were called substi-
'
tutes. Again in World War II, when the large resource mobilization
program started, it was found that the inventory of chemical sub­
stances known to man had passed two million in number. But many
of these substances were as yet called "substitutes" in political, ad­
ministrative and military Washington. Even today, despite interim
development of fundamental knowledge to the contrary, we speak
erroneously of "artificial" materials, "synthetics," and so forth. The
basis for this erroneous terminology is the notion that Nature has
certain things which we call natural, and everything else is "man made,"
ergo artificial. But what one learns in chemistry is that Nature wrote
all the rules of structuring; man does not invent chemical structuring
rules; he only discovers the rules. All the chemist can do is to find out
what Nature permits, and any substances that are thus developed or
discovered are inherently natural. It is very important to remember
that.

     III. THE MYTH OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

The name "industrial designer" was invented about 1926, and it
was invented by the professional advertising company forefathers of
what is now known as "Madison Avenue" on behalf of large banking
groups investing in the automobile industry. The banking groups were
getting together all the machine tools, production tools, jigs, fixtures
and buildings in Detroit that had originally belonged to one hundred
and twenty-five starters of the now eighty per cent bankrupt automobile
companies' roster. The idea was that if they put enough tools together
they might reach the point where the production capacity would be of
adequate magnitude to sustain courting of the mass market price. By
1926, Wallstreeters had learned, after billions of dollars of trial and
26
 THE COMPREHENSIVE MAN

    error failures of the early 1920's, the fact that one hundred and thirty­
    five thousand cars a year by any one company was the minimum pro­
    duction rate required to amortize capital investment and make a sus­
    taining profit.
       The bankers dismissed from Detroit all the inventors of automobiles.
    They didn't want any more inventing of automobiles. They wanted
    only economical production of transportation units from those tools
    which themselves were immune to the devastation of dollar bank­
    ruptcy. But the big investment banking houses knew that the American
    public had learned to go to automobile shows annually to see the new
    cars, anq saw in the swift advance of automobile inventiveness that a
    new era of man was in the making. There was something emotionally

' , essential and satisfying to the American in those new cars. The cars
embodied _whole constellations of ingenuity and invention and the users
learned intimately about the parts. They understood thoroughly by
direct experimentation regarding the significance of seven main bear­
ings as against four; they knew because they were both the active
laboratory workers and underwriters of the costs. They could adjust
their own carburetors and grind their own valves. The public was in­
timate not only with the cars but also with the methods used in making
them. So the question the banking houses had to face was, "What are
you going to do about the American public's desire to have a new car
each year now that the inventors have been kicked out of Detroit and
production men put in as the managing authority?"
The pre-Madison Avenue public mind-molders then said, "This is
very easy; there's a new invention called the airbrush. We will use it
in our advertising work. Pictures of the automobiles are going to ap­
pear to be advanced-but as pure camouflage. The changes will be as
superficial as fashion changes, but people will think they are looking
at a new car. The public has now an appetite-momentum for automo­
biles, so all that is needed from here on in is a familiar lure for his con­
ditioned reflex. This superficial rather than fundamental design func­
tion will be effected by a new industrial showman to be called an in­
dustrial designer."
This was the beginning of the greatest betrayal of mass communi­
cation integrity in our era of history. Progressively rationalized, it
seemed to justify every manner of mass self-deceit of world peoples
by their own self-ventriloquized corruption of their democratically
tried and accepted institutions and their conventionalized characteris­
tics and symbolic abstract beings. We are now paying the price. We
have learned to kid ourselves in so complete a manner that we are
liable to have a great economic bust-led by four hundred horse power,
27
 R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

  two and a half ton chariots of guaranteed "supreme distinction." The
  self-deceit which we have practiced may cost democracy a major cold
  war defeat falsely to be charged to democracy's bamboozled account.
  Obviously, I think industrial design is a very tarnished affair. I'm
  terribly sorry that many young students, fooled by the words "in­
  dustry" and "design," which independently are healthy words, think
  that because the words have been linked and there is a course called
  "Industrial Design," they are going to learn something about the
  fundamentals of design initiation in industry. I assure you that no
  aircraft company will let an industrial designer through their engineer­
  ing front door. They consider industrial designers pure interior and
  exterior decorators. And yet I've listened to industrial designers as­
  sert that they designed the new steamship, United States. If you were
  to exhibit schematically all the items that the industrial designers de­
  signed for the United States, you would have sailing down New York
  harbor an array of window curtains, chairs, paint clouds and bric-a­
  brac floating in space. Nothing really to hold it all together. To assert
  that they designed the United States could not have been more dis­
  honest.
      Some naval architects designed that ship-naval architects of extra­
  ordinary capability. No industrial designer was allowed near until
   the ship was built. The industrial designers were not even allowed to
  touch the exterior color of the ship, because the color depended on such
  things as whether the ship would be in northerly, temperate, or tropi­
   cal waters-black if the former and white if the latter. The black ab­
   sorbs sun heat, white reflects it; the right colors save thousands of
   dollars of air-conditioning costs. The naval architects were not given
   control of interior decoration because they were not the operating
   riskers who decided to build the ship. And the people who put up the
   money want to be really sure they are going to be able to sell their
   rooms as against the other fellow's, so they don't dare trust the engi­
   neer. And, after all, the engineer is inclined to say, "This bed will hold
   you up." Engineers are inclined to tolerate the crude but "safely ade­
   quate." So the advertising and public relations men said, "Go over
   here, boys, and hire the ones who know how to design the man of dis­
   tinction's brothels." The sure-sale conditioning is really that bad.

                      IV. A ONE-TOWN WORLD

    At our present moment in history, whether we in America like it
  or not, we are no longer geographically isolated. Within six years from
   28

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 I
THE COMPREHENSIVE MAN

 today you will be able to go in the morning to any part of the earth
 by public conveyance, do your day's work, and reach home again in
 the evening, and by the Treasury Department's income tax allowance
 for traveling expense, you will not have been out of town. We will be
 realistically, legally in a one-town world for the first time in history.
 Not only that, but we will have a trebling of our world population, as
 against the population at the beginning of the century. vVe will have a
 world population working very close to four billion, and by most ex­
 treme estimates, heading toward fifteen billion by the end of the cen­
 tury. The design students who are now graduating are going to have
 to handle billions of additional people. Town-planning is now mean­

.i
ingless if it is not also world-planning.
So we must start comprehensively with all men. Mobility is man's
first positive and negative kind of security-his innate ability ( unlike
that of a vegetable or a tree) to advance or retreat. Soon man will be
able to advance and retreat all the way around the world, and will
do so; he can both associate and disassociate to extraordinary advan­
tage. Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume
the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined fo the scale
of the total world-pattern of needs, resource flows, its recirculatory
and regenerative processes.
Comprehensively anticipatory design science architects will have
to think in the terms of great patterning envisioned by Sir Halford
Mackinder, who was a very great geographer in England. Sir Halford
Mackinder said in 1900 to the British high command, "The land rail­
way is a surprise child of the age-old marine railway, which was in­
vented to launch heavy ships upon the water, only within which ships
supported by water could carry the large and heavy cargoes to be
transported, which were greater than those that could be transported
on the backs of men or animals. The grand strategy of the world­
around British empire is predicated on the proposition that the world's
waterfront is the terminal of heavy logistical mobility. But now if you
think the 'waterfront' is where the ocean stops, you are getting very
much fooled, because the 'waterfront' is now where you can carry the
kind of cargoes that do the missions you used to do on the water. The
marine railway in reverse finally launched the railroads upon the land,
and the railroads are using the land for a new kind of ocean. Your
'waterfront' is retreating to the terminal of the railroads and even be­
yond as the cargoes go in the auto-trucks, which are pneumatic-tired
canal boats." He scared the British into realizing that technology was
indeed -altering basic considerations, but after \i/orld War I the Brit­
ish were too physically tired to listen to Halford Mackinder's further
29
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

theory. Mackinder, however, had developed some now famous con­
cepts, such as "heartland." "Who rules the Near East rules the heart­
land and who rules the heartland rules the world." He looked at the
whole of the earth and at all the waterfronts and he showed how the
people in the north had the highest stimulation to invention because
they were exposed annually to many more severe climatic changes
than were tropical peoples, and they tended to invent in response to
the greater extremes. These were typical of Mackinder's comprehen­
sive thoughts and they became the very essence of the pre-World War
I British Empire's strategy. The British, spent by World War I, paid
little heed to Mackinder's post-1918 thoughts. He said, "Gentlemen,
there's something very much bigger happening now. Airplanes, used
up to now only for war purposes and stunting, are going to fly the
world skies as passenger and cargo transports. In effect the primary
logistical ocean now flows completely up and over the whole land.
Our dry land is simply the bottom of the world's one airocean. Your
'waterfront' is gone completely. How now are you going to hold your
heartland? You had better change your strategy greatly and look prin­
cipally to the air."
Though the British paid little attention to Mackinder at this time,
he had one student who paid a whole lot of attention. He was a German
named Haushofer. Haushofer went back to Germany and became
the great strategy counsel to Hitler and to Goering. He told them of
Mackinder's unheeded counsel to the British, which he translated into
German as "geopolitics," the word best known today as identifying
Mackinder, its inventor, and the Luftwaffe and blitzkrieg strategy
was paradoxically predicated upon Mackinder's warning to their pro­
verbial enemy, England.
Mackinder's books dramatically emphasize a powerful discipline
in treating with whole-world problems. As we are now concerned with
the whole world, your students must gain working familiarity with the
whole earth and its comprehensive evolutionary processes in all de­
partments. Their home towns, or where to get a job, the state boards­
all are secondary or lesser levels of consideration.
Long isolated from the rest of the world, we could get by despite our
great ignorance; we could make bad mistakes without visible conse­
quence. We are now only seven per cent of the world's population and
we are gradually learning that at least fifty-one per cent of the earth's
population doesn't like us at all any more. They once loved us for our
pro ten\innocuous naivete; today they are bored or disdainful of our
irresponsibility. Apparently we are unable to formulate aught but
defensive policy. It is now essential that we expose our students direct-·
30
 THE COMPREHENSIVE MAN

ly to the big show. What we need is positive design, which politicians
neither dare to make or are capable of making. Inasmuch as we have
the students with a proclivity for becoming advanced in the disciplines
of architecture as resource integrators, it is in evidence that their high­
est capability may be developed only by exposure to the full breadth
o-f economic geography and to the comprehensive array of front line
science and technology potentials scientifically comprehensive and
economically effective in our day. But I am of the conviction that it
can be done only by applying our highest technical competence directly
to the satisfaction of all humanity's needs and satisfactions rather than
giving priority to military preparedness incidental to which there fol­
lows the second-hand inept conversion of war-production-born tech­
nology to peaceful needs, after enormous wasting of technical poten­
tials in obsolete war goods. As we employ the total science and resource
potential directly to world-man's peaceful advantage, the numbers of
those participating in the total capability will swiftly increase from the
present thirty-six per cent to one hundred per cent. The new self­
employed architect is the one fellow in all the world who may accelerate
realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely prac­
tical within the scope of available technology. The self-commissioned
architect is the obviously exclusive potential, for as at present used, or
designed, the world's resources are capable of serving only forty per
cent of humanity. Politics can only redeal the inadequate cards, but
scientifically known principles may employ those same resources by
new design in such a manner of increased ratio of performance per
pound of resources as to make the same overall tonnage of world re­
sources serve one hundred per cent of humanity and at higher stand­
ards of effectiveness and satisfaction than any as yet experienced by
their most hitherto advantaged of men. It is new design by architects
versus world revolution by political leadership.

V. ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH IN UNIVERSITIES

In the terrific depression of the thirties every architect was unem­
ployed, as well as all the new architectural graduates. Many went to
Russia and to other world places trying to find something to do. Then
the New Deal came in and socialized building by taking over the under­
lying mortgage base, the economic base of last recourse of so-called
real wealth. The government put some new equity into building
through technical renovation. The government has nearly 100 billion
dollars worth of mortgages right now on its hands, and in order to keep
31
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

inefficient building arts alive, has to extend payment to thirty years
for homes which could be so economically produced ( under compre­
hensive architecture) as to be paid for in one year. So in the U.S.A.
socialization of building led socialization of industry, and all economic
initiative is now led exclusively by the negative credit billions for de­
fense undertakings. We should not be misled by this. Though the gov­
ernment allows its so-called private banks to issue the mortgage mon­
ey, it is the government which underwrites the mortgage. Building has
been completely socialized. The money has not been risked by the bank;
it has been put up out of government guarantee depositors' accounts
as a convenience to a government by a people who like to pretend that
they are against socialism. Naught has been risked by the individual
loaner, only by the individual as "buyer."
The fact that there seems to be employment for architects in the
post-World War II years is then a product of a socialism that has an
increasingly bad risk for which it has to give longer years and easier
terms to buyers while paying higher and higher rates of interest on
its government borrowings. Look, then, at the times when the archi­
tects' offices may not be busy due to the inflationary spiral generated
by government underwriting of continually more obsolete and rela­
tively more inefficient building art. In order to contract with the de­
fense generated dollars, architects need a lot of draftsmen, and a great
many architectural schools have been turning out architectural gradu­
ates only to be draftsmen. Extraordinarily talented boys become draft­
ing machines or catalogue searching machines. Architectural sthools
are then providing socialism with functions, which in the era of auto­
mation will become as obsolete as human functions as are aviators to
the guided missiles.
I am frequently invited to speak at the A.I.A. regional conventions
to discuss problems of the architectural future and Mr. X, of a promi­
nent firm, will ask, "Do you advocate our inaugurating a research de­
partment in our firm?" My answer is, "I'm perfectly sure you do not
have enough money to do so, as research and development cost far
more than the money which could be saved from architects' profits."
There is an effective strategy open to the architects. It is to be dis­
covered in the following generalized statement. ·whereas doctors deal
with the interior organisms of man, architects deal with the exterior
organisms of man. Architects might join with one another to carry on
their work in laboratories as does anticipatory medicine. Architects
might solve design problems of world-resource use before people get
into resource troubles. Architects might thus join forces as do scien­
tists with the integrity of inter-self accrediting of the respective abilities
32
 THE COMPREHENSIVE MAN

of each individual on the team. Architects might begin the laboratory
pooling of their resource capabilities at the university level.
At present the architectural schools are under the impression that
practicing professional architectural firms want them to produce drafts­
men. Architects should tell architectural schools that they also favor
research and development in the university ( where society has already
provided the multi-million dollar facilities). Architects might find
themselves returning to participate in the research instead of dreaming
about it in their offices.
Such a policy has already met with favor. Last year in several re­
gional conventions I proposed such architectural participation in our
university research program, which was later carried out as a practical
matter with considerable satisfaction and enthusiasm. I have had
sufficient experience in this direction to dare to say without misleading
you that such research laboratory undertaking in the university will
meet with increasing professional support. Possibly in their own non­
busy times, professional architects could return as graduate students
in that research and development. This would make it possible for the
students to participate with men of experience, who could say, "The
hard facts of life are thus-and-so once you get out of here, and that's
why I'm coming back."

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